The Data Deluge: How to Use Insights Effectively

I used to work with an analyst who would often say “data is the consumer telling you what they want and content is how the brand can give it to them”. This guy is one of the smartest people I’ve met, so, while this seemed to him like a great line to impress in a meeting, I took it to heart.

As a marketer this concept is both empowering and enlightening. Data is the output of people’s interactions with your brand and its related touchpoints. You can take the insights extrapolated from that data to feed your content strategy which, in turn, is going to elevate your marketing content.

But one of the challenges that comes with this approach is the risk of being paralysed by all the information that surfaces; there are so many individual data points and so many ways to interpret all those data points that marketers often don’t know where to start.

During my time in digital marketing at Tourism Australia, this was a pursuit that occupied most of my team’s time. We had all the data we could ever want, but we needed to know what questions to ask in order to direct our strategy and what we were producing. It’s so important to get those questions right from the outset so you can be confident the insights you develop are going to serve your strategy well.

In my opinion, there are three major questions you want to ask to guide your insights development. As you get deeper into the data, other questions will emerge and that’s okay; these questions will set you off in the right direction.

First things first, ‘what do I want to know about my audience?’

This may seem a rather epic question, but we’re starting at the macro and then zooming in. By asking yourself this question, you’re framing up what you don’t know and are looking to find out.

For example, you may want to know why your audience isn’t engaging with certain types of website content or how often viewers are watching your YouTube videos through to the end. Whatever you do, don’t answer this question with something like “I want to know everything” because you’ll very soon be swimming in more data than you can handle.

Next, ask yourself ‘how much data will allow me to make the best decisions?’

Now that you’re clear on what you want to know, you must set a confidence threshold so you can feel comfortable you’re getting enough data to put your conclusions on solid ground. For channel-specific strategies, I’d usually say six months of data is enough; if you’re going for an all-out strategy, go with at least 12 months.

You’ll also want to be sure that you have data that represents your current audience as well as your potential audience. If your strategy is primarily for existing channels and audience, you want at least 70 percent of the data to represent this group; conversely, if you’re working to, say, increase the size of your social media audience, skew the data heavily towards the audience you’re aspiring to grow.

Finally, think about the question ‘what is best practice?’

While your own data gives you a wealth of information about what’s working with the content you’re publishing, this doesn’t give you an understanding of where the bar is set more broadly in the marketplace. Start looking around for both quantitative and qualitative data (reports, presentations, news articles etc) that allow you to analyse the performance of your content against the competitive set and even brands you’re aspiring to be like.

Combine these questions to continually refine and rationalise your data set. You may have many inputs from many sources, but if you’re clear on what you want to know about your audience, understand how much data will give you confidence and have a yardstick to compare your own performance to, the volume of data you’re working with will be more manageable. And once you have that under control, you can be certain of developing cracking insights on which to base your content strategy.